Strength
by Chronos Keeper
Summary: Vriska's thoughts as her carefully constructed view on strength is challenged by Tavros.


Of course she'd seen him sleep before. After all, their Sgrub debacle lasted for nearly a month; it was to be expected that at some point during those days, long or short as they may have seemed, that one of them would have had to sleep.

Of course, she insisted that he never need watch her back. With a flip of her hair and a roll of her eyes, she would dismiss whatever quibbling concern he had, informing him that no minion or underling alive could get the drop on Marquise Spineret. It was just ridiculous to imply otherwise, and her voice would raise in volume to drown out his feeble but but buts, and she would thump to the ground, scooching around to find somewhere comfortable as she commanded him to go do something other than watch her back. She didn't need a cripple's help. Go cuddle with animals or something, because god knows that's the most you could be expected to do with them. And usually she would wake up with Tavros covered in an array of creatures, basically the only time he was allowed to make friends with them being when she was unconscious. Once she woke up to him softly telling a story to an imp, which was seated in his lap gazing up at him with large button eyes, transfixed by his words.

It was really quite disturbing. She didn't want to admit how cute it was, because alright yes it was, but dammit Tavros was just doing it wrong. So very very wrong.

But she did have to watch over him when he slept. She would waspishly declare what a failkid he was, sometimes underscoring her point with a few pointed slaps to the back of his head, or a twist of his ear, or other assorted body part. She never really got used to watching him delicately divest himself of his wheelchair; it was seriously creepy and a little more pathetic than she would have liked to admit. Actually, Tavros was the only troll she'd ever seen crippled. As a rule, trols who were maimed or injured beyond use or practicle repair were culled; it was simple as that. That he should have hobbled along for sweeps after his, ahem, accident was really kind of galling.

It sort of made her want to repeatedly plant her head against a wall, or something.

He was so helpless it was enraging.

But killing him then would have only made her lose her company, as well as an adventure partner. It was kind of, like, an unspoken rule that you needed a second half in order to get the most out of an adevnture. So Tavros stayed, and hauled himself up in his chair using only his arms, and Vriska would watch the corded muscles in his too-skinny arms as he would hold himself there, shifting himself around. Usually, he managed to get himself out of the chair alone, using the aid of whatever steady and inanimate object he could grasp and lower himself with. He would arrange his legs once he would carefully fall to the floor, self conscious under her narrow scrutiny.

And she always watched him. She made it a point to.

(For a lot of reasons. Partly, she wanted him to know under no uncertain terms how pathetic she found him. Partly, and she would never admit this to anyone, she would watch him because she never wanted to forget the consequences of a mistake. Whether the mistake was carelessness because he was still alive, or that she had effected this disability, she never tried to examine too closely.)

Sometimes, she had to help him get out of his chair.

She hated doing that. Her heart would hammer and her skin would crawl, and she was glad Tavros was just so damn oblivious, because they would get close enough that he could have seen the vein in her throat pulsing way too quickly. But he never said or asked anything during the ordeal, which was just as well. She hated touching him; he didn't feel healthy or young, and it made her hate him more. He didn't have much of any flush to his skin, and it was always so papery and dry. Not like, dry skin dry, like sick dry. And he didn't have any squish to him; even Equius had a little squish, even though he peaked way to early and looked sweeps older than he really was. Tavros was all tendon and bone, and maybe a little fat on his belly because he couldn't move much down there. Where he wasn't bony, the muscles were just... hanging. If he had muscles there at all.

The thing she hated the most was touching his legs. She tried not to, if she could help it. But him being in a chair made it ridiculously hard to do crap like scale boulders and such, so sometimes, touching his legs was the inevitable thing to do. They were... shriveled, was the best word for it. It's like his body was all busy growing up, but his legs forgot to those sweeps ago. They stayed the skinny legs of a wriggler at 4 or 5. What was worse was that the muscles in there barely seemed to stretch over the bones.

Out of all of the repulsive things she had done, handling Tavros's legs was probably near the top of the list. Of course, she always tamped down the distant horror she may have been feeling that she had caused this, and he had lived through it. If that didn't make him strong, she didn't know what would. But it wasn't fair to give him credit like that; all he had to do was passively keep on living, right?

Never mind that he probably had to fight, fight, fight all those nasty infections that would undoubtedly sprung up for a kid who had no access to medical care, given his disgusting position on the hemospectrum, and fight the pain, and fight to move, and fight to exist at all, it wasn't the same. Right? It was a frantic little mantra she would repeat somewhere in the back of her head, right right right?, Tavros is really just as pathetic and weak as you always thought.

Partly because it would have made -her- weak if he had somehow recovered from his botched murder. She couldn't do the job right, and didn't have the heart to check if he was good and dead, crumpled at the bottom of the cliff, and it just proved what a softy she was for not doing it.

Partly because she didn't want all of her carefully constructed mental barriers and routes to seem less stable than they always seemed. There were certain inalienable truths she had come to live by; she was a predator, and everyone else was pray. She was strong; they were weak. She hated Tavros Nitram. And she liked having these compass points to fix on when everything else whirled out of control.

She could feel his heart beneath his ribs as she held on to him to steady him, rolling her eyes and lambasting him all the while, thumping away under the twig-like rows of bone, and how, somehow, there was a horrible little pang that she would try to quell by yelling louder, a pang that was reminding her how alive he really was.

And he would just passively accept her abuse, and she would never, ever allow herself to consider for longer than a fraction of a second that maybe, just maybe, Tavros was stronger than she let herself think, given all that he could endure. 


End file.
